[Cross posted from a piece I put up on the Foundry Group blog earlier today]

Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the* gathering place for developers working on the connective technologies that hold the web and IT infrastructure together – from web services to SOA to APIs and cloud computing. Eric Norlin – our partner in Gluecon, Defrag and now Blur – has helped bring together technology leaders for an in depth (and proudly geeky) conversation around the changing landscape of these technologies and the applications they support.

As we move towards our third year running Gluecon we’re extremely pleased to announce a hugely important sponsorship with Alcatel-Lucent. ALU will become the Community Underwriter for the conference. This partnership will really change the face of Glue and open up even more opportunities for companies to participate. For starters, ALU is underwriting the ability for 15 companies to demo at Glue. These companies will be selected completely on merit by a selection committee that includes:

I’m excited because I feel like we have the ability to really change the game with this one. If you take away the company specific conference (Google i/o, Twitter, F8), there really just aren’t that many national-level gathering spots for developers in the cloud/API space. There are a lot of “business level” and “workshop” conferences that happen around cloud computing, but we’re talking DEVELOPERS.

And even where there are developer gatherings in the cloud/API space, the ability to pay has always been a limiting factor for startups and companies wanting tho show their wares and exhibit.

That ends with Gluecon 2011. With Gluecon 2011 developers in the cloud/API space have the ability to participate in a pure meritocracy. Wow the selection committee and you’re in.

At the end of the day, what I want to see is 500+ developers coming to Gluecon to build apps, figure out cloud infrastructure, scaling, security, and solve the tough problems around API construction, usage and maintenance.

If you’re a company interested in participating, click here for more details.

Hi, I'm Seth Levine, a Boulder, CO based technology investor and managing director at Foundry Group. While I love technology I’m also a husband, father, avid cyclist, snowboarder and outdoors guy. I live just outside of Boulder with my wife Greeley and our three wonderful kids.